Denise nodded.
I returned to the clip one last time.
Talia's final question remained unanswered beneath the frozen microphone.
I wrote it on a card and placed it in the drawer beside my desk, where no visitor would mistake it for a judicial instruction.
It was a question for me too.
The missing corridor recording became a second public argument.
People who trusted Briggs called its absence proof that the case depended on status and emotion. People who distrusted the department assumed someone had disabled it for him.
Both groups sounded certain before anyone finished checking the equipment.
Vega's investigators requested maintenance records, network logs, work tickets, and the history of the contract covering the third floor. They interviewed a technician who had been summoned before the encounter.
The network switch failed at seven twenty-three that morning.
Several devices lost service, including a printer in an office whose staff had no idea Briggs would later stop me nearby. The technician's first ticket predated the encounter by almost ninety minutes.
No evidence supported deliberate interference.
When Vega explained the finding, I felt relief and embarrassment together.
Part of me had been waiting for a darker account. The ordinary failure did not make what happened acceptable. It did make one accusation unnecessary.
“Then say that clearly,” I told my attorney, Paul Hart, when we discussed the public speculation.
He was a civil litigator whose first advice had been to let investigators investigate and stop answering questions as though I were presiding over my own case.
“I will,” he said. “And you'll continue not debating it online.”
“I wasn't debating.”
“You were drafting.”
He knew me too well after only three meetings.
The adjacent elevator camera had remained online because it used a different connection. Its normal field showed lift doors, a waiting area, and the glass panel opposite the corridor.
In that panel, part of the encounter appeared as a reflection.
It was not a miraculous recovery.
The angle was poor. There was no sound. People passed between the camera and the glass. The device had been installed to document activity near the lifts, not settle a future dispute beyond the corner.
Investigators preserved the original and prepared a clearly identified enlargement without pretending the process could create details the image never contained.
They could see Briggs approach.
They could see him block my route.
His hand moved toward my arm. My body shifted away. Another movement followed, then my head turned and the briefcase fell.
The reflection could support parts of the witness accounts.
It could not supply every word or establish every intention.
I first watched it with Paul after my statement was complete.
The woman in the glass seemed too small.
I had remembered standing with more room around me. The recording showed how close Briggs came and how little space remained between the bench and the wall.
I asked to watch it again.
The examiner warned that enlarging the reflection would not make every finger or expression legible. She showed us the unaltered frame before the prepared viewing copy. I was grateful she explained the limit before either side could turn a vague shape into a certainty. The case did not need a camera to see more than it had actually recorded.
Paul said I could stop.
“I need to know what it actually shows.”
We played it twice more, then paused when my briefcase opened.
There were the papers, reduced to pale shapes across the reflection.
I could not see the wet shoe print.
It still existed.
That small absence helped me understand why the recording felt both powerful and incomplete. It documented an event without containing the full experience of anyone inside it.
Witnesses supplied other parts.
Nadia Flores heard me give my name and offer a chamber extension. A civil clerk saw the second reach and my hand moving it away. One prosecutor saw the strike directly; another had turned only after the sound.
Their statements differed at the edges.
Vega treated those differences as facts to examine rather than mistakes to erase. A person facing the lifts could not have seen what someone beside the bench saw. The sound brought some people into the event after others were already watching.
Sam had heard the impact before turning the corner. He did not claim to have watched the hand land.
I respected him more for that limitation than I would have for a stronger account he could not honestly give.